The perfect is the enemy of the good

A blogger creates a false identity and feels free to tell a whole multitude of lies, without any concern for those he is deceiving or for the dangerous consequences for some of them. The Pope is Catholic. Bears crap in the woods. The Tom MacMaster scandal is merely the tip of a very ugly iceberg: the blogosphere.

In some other places and at some other times, people were prepared to suffer persecution as the price of speaking out. Dissidents were ready to spend decades in prison and endure torture and ruin, or risk assault or assassination, because they spoke in their own name. There were gods other than comfort and self-gratification. Unfortunately, things are different today in the Western democratic world, where people have become so pampered by freedom, and so averse to anything that smacks of risk, that they indulge in the pleasure of speaking their mind without accepting the responsibility that comes with putting their name to what they say.

That a society which upholds freedom of speech, and which provides its citizens with unprecedented opportunities to exercise it, should also be one in which the vast majority that comments on the internet does so anonymously, is a symptom of the cowardice and the corruption of spirit that are corroding Western public ethics. Not for us, the path of a Martin Luther King, an Andrei Sakharov, a Vaclav Havel or an Aung San Suu Kyi. No, your Western blogger or commenter is unwilling to write under their real name, because they fear ‘problems in the workplace’. Or else the poor little darlings are worried that they may say something embarrassing and not be able to delete it afterwards. It’s a jolly good thing that earlier generations did all the hard work of fighting for democracy and human rights, because our present generation clearly would not be up to the task; would not be willing to risk so much as a scratched finger in the cause of struggling for freedoms that we take for granted.

From there, it is a short step to feeling possessed of the right to create false personas, then multiple false personas, so that every other blogger becomes an aspiring little Talented Mr Ripley. Inevitably, some, like MacMaster, will become so carried away by their adventures of deceit that they will end up seriously hurting or endangering others. Scams like his are structurally inherent in the nature of the blogosphere.

This is part of a more general malaise of selfishness that is eating away at the Western world. People fetishise rights and freedoms but despise duty and responsibility. They don’t want to pay taxes so that other people can have free university education, or even free healthcare. Some, probably most extremely rich people think it is entirely appropriate to make vast sums of money through the existing order, yet to evade as much as possible giving any of it back in taxes. Others see nothing wrong with spending their whole life living off state benefits, without any attempt at getting a job. Men and women have extraordinarily high expectations of romantic relationships, yet are frequently unwilling to give even a fraction emotionally of what it takes to make a relationship work.

Having said this, I do not blame any individual for choosing to blog or comment anonymously; some, if not most, of my favourite bloggers do so. It is the collectivity that is to blame; it has created an atmosphere in which it is more and more psychologically difficult for people to write under their real names – like being the only nudists on a crowded beach. Fear of writing under one’s own name may be justified, in some cases at least, given the toleration accorded by lazy comments moderators to abuse and even violent threats; their creation of an atmosphere that encourages intimidation. The selfish, spoilt, decadent, phoney morality of the blogosphere privileges liars, frauds, trolls, bullies, libellers, rumour-mongers, hate-mailers, stalkers and vulgarians over honest, decent commenters – all in the name of a ‘freedom of speech’ that it clearly does not understand.

Let me spell out a few truths that should be obvious but apparently are not. If a woman office-worker turns up at her office and finds the notice board covered with anonymous messages calling her a ‘bitch’ and a ‘slut’, and accusing her of sleeping around to gain promotion, and she complains to the manager, and if the manager then refuses to allow the messages to be removed, then he is not standing up for ‘freedom of speech’; he is colluding with sexual harassment. If an ugly, overweight or mentally retarded teenage girl is mercilessly teased by her classmates at school until she is finally driven to hang herself, the teachers that failed to stop the bullying were not ‘respecting freedom of speech’; they were criminally negligent. Yet blog (non-)moderators apparently don’t understand the difference between harassment and ‘freedom of speech’.

The anonymity and the laxness of the blogosphere corrupt our public discourse, as extraordinary expressions of vulgarity, hatred and venom, or of dishonesty, or of inaccuracy and laziness in the written word, are first treated as acceptable by bloggers, after which the rot spreads to other media. Yet the brave soul who tries to take a stand against this tide calls down upon themselves all the blogosphere’s hypocritical, righteous indignation.

When an elected Conservative councillor called publicly via Twitter for the columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown – of whom I’m myself no fan – to be ‘stoned to death’, and she announced her intention of reporting him to the police, there were those who somehow believed he was the victim. Apparently, our elected representatives aren’t actually expected to set any kind of example of correct behaviour. When a frustrated traveller stuck at an airport threatened via Twitter to ‘blow the airport sky high’ and was consequently arrested under the Terrorism Act, this ‘martyr’ and his subsequent supporters apparently considered the tough job the police have to do fighting terrorism to be simply less important than the right to throw a wholly irresponsible public tantrum for suffering an inconvenience that millions of people experience every year. Hello ? Are you not aware that we’re fighting a mortal struggle against terrorists trying to destroy the freedom to tweet, and that our police have a difficult enough job to do without you adding these complications ?

Blogging is a responsibility as well as a pleasure. If you blog, you should take responsibility for what you say. If you really must remain anonymous, don’t say things that you would consider embarrassing or inappropriate under your real name. Either moderate the comments ethically, or keep the comments closed; don’t pretend you’re some sort of champion of the little blogger who can’t afford paid moderators, just because you can’t be bothered to moderate.

If you write something on your blog and it turns out to be grossly untrue, it should rightly affect your reputation. The knowledge that what you say might turn out to be false should act as an incentive to be very careful with what you say. If other people suffer as a result of your words, you should rightly be held to account – not in the sense of the secret police turning up to throw you in prison, but in a manner appropriate for a democracy; you should suffer the public opprobrium. If you are dishonest, sloppy, unreliable, vulgar or abusive, you should be known as such. Your face should not remain youthful and unblemished, like Dorian Gray’s, while the portrait in the attic is distorted beyond recognition by the ugliness of your sins.

There should be no freedom of speech without responsibility of speech; no freedom without responsibility. If you aren’t prepared to pay your fair share of taxes to support the healthcare, education, welfare and security of your fellow citizens – upon whom you and your prosperity ultimately depend – you have no business making money. Progressives know this, so they should stop upholding selfishness in one field while they criticise it in others. Because quite frankly, if the ugly mess we have today is ‘freedom of speech’, then it’s time to question the concept.

About

A blog devoted to political commentary and analysis, with a particular focus on South East Europe. Born in 1972, I have been studying the history of the former Yugoslavia since 1993, and am intimately acquainted with, and emotionally attached to, the lands and peoples of Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Serbia. In the summer of 1995, I acted as translator for the aid convoy to the Bosnian town of Tuzla, organised by Workers Aid, a movement of solidarity in support of the Bosnian people. In 1997-1998 I lived and worked in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Hercegovina. In 1998-2001 I lived and worked in Belgrade, Serbia, and was resident there during the Kosovo War of 1999. As a journalist, I covered the fall of Milosevic in 2000. I worked as a Research Officer for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2001, and participated in the drafting of the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic.

I received my BA from the University of Cambridge in 1994 and my PhD from Yale University in 2000. I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the British Academy in 2001-2004, a member of the Faculty of History of the University of Cambridge in 2001-2006, an Associate Professor at Kingston University in 2006-2017, and am currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations of the Sarajevo School of Science and Technology, affiliated with the University of Buckingham. This blog was launched while I was living in Surbiton in the UK. I am based in Sarajevo and London.